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| April 8th, 2006 by Godfre Leung (Permalink) Add Comments |
Sebadoh III (Homestead 1991, reissued Domino 2006)
I rarely read Pitchforkmedia reviews anymore. It has nothing to do with the recent Nick Sylvester controversy — actually, it’s been so long since I’ve regularly read their reviews that I’m more familiar with Sylvester’s work in The Village Voice than Pitchfork. And I don’t even live in New York. But the other morning, as I was killing five minutes before having to catch the bus, I went on Pitchfork to read their newswire and saw the headline, “Lifetime sign to Fall Out Boy’s label.” Now, I’m not 100% sure which of the bands I heard on the O.C. is Fall Out Boy, but a part of my childhood died right there. It’s been years since I’ve pulled out Lifetime’s Hello Bastards and I can’t imagine the impulse coming to me anytime soon, but some things are sacred and Lifetime is one of those things for me.
I don’t need to be telling you that we all form connections to certain bands and albums. Some albums, Hello Bastards being one for me, mark for us a specific time and a place. Banal, I know. But for me, Lifetime was a private obsession, a band that almost no one else I knew liked. Either Lifetime was too hardcore for you or it wasn’t nearly hardcore enough, too unmusical or too unsophisticated and too pop-punk. So to find out from Pitchfork ten years later that I unknowingly shared my little, private obsession with kids who went on to be in bands I can’t tell apart like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance was disheartening to say the least. But then I saw something that perked me right back up: Pitchfork’s featured review, a reissue of Sebadoh III.
What? Sebadoh III, which I’ve been saying was the greatest album of the 90’s to anyone with ears since all of those best of the decade lists came out six years ago, is sufficiently well-regarded to merit a two disc expanded reissue? Almost no one I know who listened to what was then much less ironically called “indie rock” (without the insufferable bunny quotes, at any rate) in the early 90’s still even has a copy of Sebadoh III. Most have Nevermind and Slanted & Enchanted close by; Exile in Guyville and No Pocky for Kitty remain well represented; over the last decade, we’ve developed first name basis relationships with Loveless, Repeater, and Spiderland; and, now and then, I even see Pearl Jam Ten, outside of time, in all its denim-clad glory, as if unaware of its complete irrelevance. That’s right: love for Pearl Jam Ten and barely a wistful memory of Sebadoh III. While learning of Lifetime’s canonical status, its surrogate Weezer’s blue album-dom, among mall punks was like a shot in the heart, knowing that someone, anyone out there wanted a two disc expanded reissue of III was like finding a long lost sibling.
I’ve tried to write about III a few times over the years and, each time, I’ve failed miserably. But, because I’m not writing a review here, because I’m “recommending” this reissue to you, I’m not going to argue for its canonical status. Was it indeed the greatest album of the 90’s? All I can tell you is that it was for me.
Among the legendary early 90’s albums I’ve already mentioned, two stand out for their impact on the popular imagination. While both have meant a lot to me over the last fifteen years, they both also signal an end, which puts me in a weird relationship to them because they came out when I was ten and twelve, respectively. As much they each signal an end, they also symbolize for me a discovery. Like most people my age, Nirvana’s Nevermind was the first punk rock album I owned. At the same time, it was punk rock’s first and last intervention of its kind into the mainstream. When Nevermind blew up in 1992 — I turned eleven that year — Kurt Cobain was telling anyone with a microphone or a tape recorder about the Raincoats, Daniel Johnston, and the Pastels, all of whom would have a profound impact on the way I think about punk rock in later years. Never again would the biggest band in the world, a punk rock band at that, declare its love for such radical and marginal music. And never again would a punk rock band be given that kind of platform. (I should also note that Lifetime, as close to my heart as I continue to hold their memory, are no Raincoats.) The second album, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, closed the book on the popular imagination’s fascination with the bedroom album and, arguably, played a huge role in what would, half a decade later, become known as the Lilith Fair phenomenon. Exile was, predictably, the first bedroom pop album I ever heard. Others had existed, from as small a scale as Patrik Fitzgerald or Daniel Johnston (before they scored major label recording contracts when their work was discovered and subsequently reissued) to Bruce Springsteen’s universally lauded Nebraska. And, of course, many were to follow, some of which I count among my most treasured possessions: early cassettes and 45’s by Get the Hell Out of the Way of the Volcano and Elliott Smith, e.g. But never again (”I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me” notwithstanding) would the entire world get to hear a complete unknown’s bedroom pop album, unself-consciously written and conceived for its own sake.
In 1991, Liz Phair was recording the tracks for her Girlysound cassette, which she never meant to be a demo tape. She gave a few cassettes to friends, who in turn made copies for other friends and, as luck would have it, a copy ended up in the hands of Gerard Cosloy of Matador Records, who was sufficiently moved by it to pay her to rerecord the songs for the album that would become Exile in Guyville. At the same time, Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow was at home recording hundreds of songs on his four track. A handful of these songs were eventually released by Steve Shelley’s Smells Like Records label as Winning Losers: A Collection of Home Recordings. More than probably any other CD I’ve ever owned, Winning Losers taught me that the punk rock revolution was about the means of production, not anger, rebel poses, and pathos. In 1995, the year Lou Barlow himself, however briefly and fleetingly, touched the popular imagination with the surprise hit “The Natural One,” his Kids Soundtrack introduced me to Daniel Johnston and Slint, whose “Good Morning, Captain,” the centerpiece and summa of Spiderland, was like nothing I’d ever heard before. That’s what Lou Barlow means to me. He’s my Liz and my Kurt, my Exile in Guyville and Nevermind, all at once.
As for Sebadoh III itself, its relevance is as apparent to me today as the first time I heard it. No other album I know of so perfectly encapsulates what early 90’s punk rock was all about: the happy accident, unassuming voices for a generation that couldn’t be bothered to speak, the “slacker revolution.” The accidental brilliance (accidental because their work was conceived under conditions of obscurity and, as such, its cultural impact was unforeseen) of Daniel Johnston, early Richard Linklater, Pavement up to and including Slanted & Enchanted, and a 19 year old Harmony Korine: Sebadoh III was right there with all of them. I am, of course, ignoring the didactic politics of Riot Grrrl, Fugazi, the Nation of Ulysses, and, to a lesser degree, the International Pop Underground. But 1991, the year Riot Grrrl Summer and the International Pop Convention decided that they wanted nothing more to do with their old comrade Kurt Cobain, was all about the revolution that begins at home. To be fair, the Chuck Taylor sneaker tapping to a four chord progression as Dave Grohl’s thundering drums come in ignited a revolution of its own. But the sound of that revolution, while it still occasionally makes me jump up and down in excitement, doesn’t compare to the one that demanded “a revolution, girl-style now.” You can hear this revolution in the three bass notes that explode into “The Freed Pig.” At the risk of sounding maudlin, this revolution, which not only declares that anyone can be a musician but also that anything you do in the privacy of your own bedroom still counts as music and is no less significant than what Eddie Vedder has to say, makes me jump every time.
Sebadoh III begins with probably the most immediate opening track of the last fifteen years, the aforementioned “Freed Pig.” The song, a “fuck you” penned to Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis, the man who sort of kind of maybe fired Lou from Dinosaur two years earlier (one thing was certain: Dinosaur had a new bassist), introduces the album with all of the resentment, jealousy, self-loathing, sarcasm, and wit that we — or, in any event, I — nostalgically remember the early 90’s by. Imagine “I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me” only even more ironic while, at the same time, totally meaning it. The album goes in a million different directions and lacks the cohesion of even Slanted & Enchanted or Guided by Voices’ early records. But this is what I love about III and what makes it so emblematic of its time. That said, Lou and his bandmates Eric Gaffney and Jason Loewenstein didn’t just write as many songs as could fit on an LP and leave it at that. While there is no internal logic to the album, what makes it an album — a statement, even — is its amalgamation of “Slack Motherfucker”-esque rockers, weepy ballads, reverential Butthole Surfers mindfucks, bedroom folk confessions, bluegrass ditties, songs that steal outright from Zen Arcade and the Cure, and a cover of the Minutemen instrumental “Sickles and Hammers,” all under one unifying name. III is punk rock arrested in 1991, before Nevermind blew up; before the manifestos in the Nation of Ulysses’ liner notes; before Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, “Loser,” “The Natural One,” and “Deceptacon”; and before April 8th, 1994. For the brief moment between the breakup of Hüsker Dü and Nevermind hitting the top of the charts, there was no template. Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, the Necros, the Meat Puppets, Bikini Kill, Daniel Johnston, Beat Happening, and Naked Raygun were all in the air and you didn’t have to sound like the Pixies… at least not yet. As the glorious mess that was Pavement’s early cassettes also attest, anything was possible.
About 55 minutes into III, you hear “Spoiled,” which is probably better known as the emotional center of the Kids Soundtrack than as the most affecting song Lou has ever written. It’s the perfect and most fitting closing song of any album I’ve ever heard, only it’s not. Which is to say that, on the most literal level, it’s not the last track of the album. That distinction goes to Eric Gaffney’s pigfucking, acid-damaged freakout “As the World Dies, the Eyes of God Get Bigger.” But “Spoiled” also doesn’t do what it sounds like it does. It’s not a lament for the youth of America, it doesn’t smell like anything resembling “teen spirit,” and it speaks about more than it speaks to or for a generation. The song also brings the album back to where it began, Dinosaur Jr. The “spoiled children” in the lyrics are, of course, Lou’s former Dinosaur bandmates J Mascis and Murph, prep school slackers from Amherst, MA and Greenwich, CT, respectively. It has often been said in the context of extolling Kurt Cobain that no one who ever set out to speak for a generation would ever truly be its voice. Well, Sebadoh never wrote a song called “Smells like Teen Spirit.” They sang about spoiled children: privileged kids who had everything, limitless possibilities, and managed to fuck it up — nay, insisted on fucking it up — completely and beyond repair. That was the story of both Dinosaur Jr — who were, by most accounts, the greatest live band in America in the late 80’s — and youth culture in the early 90’s, which went from Nirvana to Stone Temple Pilots to Silverchair so quickly I can still hardly believe it. And that’s the story of III, which crystallizes the moment before the deluge for all time.
That’s also the story of “Spoiled,” which replaced what would conventionally be string arrangements with a mellotron and somehow achieved a delicate majesty that would have so perfectly capped III that all of its incoherence could be ignored. And, after you’ve turned the volume way up to take in “Spoiled” and its whispered melancholia, “As the World Dies” begins suddenly, with arms flailing, and, to invoke the idiom of the time, blows yr fucking ears off. It surprises me to no end, but, for its exemplarity and its historical specificity as the slacker rock album par excellence of the early 90’s, III reemerged in the zeitgeist 14 years later. Kites’ Peace Trials, one of the better albums I heard last year, moves back and forth from hypnotic industrial, neo-Throbbing Gristle and Suicide repetitions to cryptic bedroom folk songs to amp abuse that rivals anything Wolf Eyes or D. Yellow Swans have ever done, all in a seemingly random succession. At first, Peace Trials alienated me. I alternately thought to myself, “I’ve already heard Black Dice,” “Great, another freak folk dude who can’t decide how he wants his album to sound and thinks he’s down with the experimental noise. That’s just what we need, another USAISAMONSTER,” and “Why can’t they just do the ear-splitting noise on all the tracks?” But then I recognized the Sebadoh III in it. If there is indeed a need for Sebadoh III to be rereleased in 2006, I’m hoping that it’s because we are at another moment in which anything is possible. Try to forget about Death Cab for Cutie, Fall Out Boy, and the O.C. The shitty bands that sound like Coldplay are all climbing out of the underground and into the mainstream. I’d like to think, however briefly, that this world is ours again. And, if I am getting a little ahead of myself here, at least Sebadoh III is back in print.
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